Inspiration Conversation

There's a new site called Unvarnished that is sure to ruffle feathers once it gets out of beta.

From the site: 

What is Unvarnished?

Unvarnished is an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation, using community-contributed, professional reviews.

Unvarnished reviews help you get the inside scoop on other business professionals, providing candid assessments of coworkers, potential hires, business partners, and more.

The first sentence is a sterile "sure whatever" description. The second one, now there's the rub. We've been reviewing products on Amazon, movies on Netflix and restaurants on Yelp for years. But reviewing people as if they're a video game? Seems a little odd at first.

Unvarnished is a review site for people.

When I tell you that Unvarnished allows users to submit reviews anonymously, I'm willing to bet your first reaction is to wince. That was my reaction as well, but I've had some time to think about it and I have to say that I've come around.

At least I think I have. 

I heard about Unvarnished just a week or so after reading "You've Been Yelped" in Inc. Magazine's February issue. The article is about Yelp, it's frightening ability to make or break a business, and owners' differing approaches to dealing with that reality.

For example, one salon owner offers exclusive deals on her Yelp page to attract new customers. If a new client schedules an appointment and mentions the site, she makes sure to cut their hair personally. Then there's the owner who tracked down a negative reviewer and ended up getting booked for battery. Not surprisingly, she describes the site as "evil".

Love it or Leave it?

While I was reading the article, it seemed clear to me that being angry that the thing exists in the first place and dismissing negative reviews outright instead of using the feedback to improve your offering was just pointless. Obviously, the best strategy is to engage with the site's users and proactively leverage the community to grow your business because it's not going to just go away.

But. Easy for me to say. My name's not on the door or the lease. I'm not the guy struggling to keep the lights to my pizza joint on.

Little did I know that a group of geeks in Silicon Valley were working on something that'll give me a chance to put my money where my mouth is. And, it may very well force the rest of you to do the same, whether you want to or not.

Make It Work

That's not just good advice from Tim Gunn on how to wow Michael Kors, it's going to have to be our default position if Unvarnished takes off.

Inc.'s advice to handling online criticism is to Register, Breathe and Be Gracious. Good advice for owners and applicable for individuals.

If the site takes the idea of "personal branding" to an entirely new level, I'll be looking to the practices of businesses who have grown thanks to Yelp, not commiserating with those who despise it.

At least I hope so.

Last week, Kathy sent me this article from Branding Strategy Insider, "The Danger of You Centered Branding". The author makes some strong points and calls out some brands who have:

"... repositioned themselves around being whatever you want them to be. Vodafone is spending millions declaring 'Power to you'. Yahoo! is proclaiming: 'There is a new master of the digital universe. You'.

"Meanwhile, T-Mobile is launching its myTouch smart-phone by asking consumers to imagine a 'one-of-a-kind phone for your one-of-a-kind life'.

"'We are about you,' say these brands. 'Whatever you want, that's what we are.' It's very 'co-creative', 'empowering' and all the other things 22-year-old marketers crap on about."

Alrighty then. Tell us what you really think.

"Unfortunately, it's not going to work, because when you don't stand for anything, you get eaten alive by competitors who do.

"It also won't work because, in my opinion, it bores consumers. ... When Time magazine tried the empowerment approach in 2006 and declared that its 'Person of the Year' was You - complete with a reflective cover - it sold poorly compared with editions from earlier years with specific people."

Could be.

It's tough to take a shot at Time magazine for correctly acknowledging that consumer generated content is going to be what Joe Biden might call, "a big deal worth taking note of." Sure, maybe the magazine didn't sell well, but four years later it's hard to say they were wrong.

"You are extremely important" is a marketing message that does very, very well. But, he is on to something. 

37 Signals (the company behind Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, etc.) famously tell their customers "No" all the time. As software programmers, they consider themselves curators. They're not going to add a feature/painting to the program/museum just because the public demands it.

This ethos works at 37 Signals and they have carved out a niche for themselves that their competitors can't touch. (Next time you'd rather watch an interesting biz lecture instead of television, watch this and to a lesser degree this.)

But, in my opinion, concluding that consumers are bored by brands that are focused on them is an overstatement. Are some? Sure. And they're the type that love 37 Signals.

But are the vast majority of consumers used to being able to customize, personalize and bejewelify products to their overly pandered-to ego's content? Yup, and they're the masters of their digital universe.

He does make a great point, that brands risk losing their identity if the only thing they really stand for is being whatever "you" want it to be.

"Saying you will be whatever the consumer wants is very different from knowing what they want and delivering it."

Amen to that, and I would add it means knowing what they want and deciding whether to say Yes or No.

The first car I ever bought was a forest green '96 Toyota Corolla with about 32,000 miles on it. I drove it for another 130,000 miles during which time I had to:

• Replace a seat belt for $80
• Replace the alternator for $200

More people are talking about Toyota than any other brand these days. And they're talking about the recalls, but also the fixes being provided by the dealerships too. And some of the consumers are probably coming to the defense of the brand too. Maybe there is some truth to the adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity after all.

There's truth to the adage especially if you have a brand that your consumers are willing to defend. Companies have been able to deflect a certain threshold of negative press through sophisticated public relations campaigns for a while now. But, in an age where a brand's identity isn't defined by the company, but by increasingly-connected consumers, having an army of satisfied customers is simply a must. Toyota's promise and reputation has always been reliability, and I'm betting there are enough "I drove it for 100,000 miles with no issues" stories to see this through.

I had the opportunity to attend "Disney's Approach to Brand Loyalty" at the Disney Institute in Orlando last week, and this is the first of what will be a series of posts relating to the many interesting topics we covered.

The image to the left is branding. Imagine the emotion in the cow's eye ... that's your Brand.

It goes without saying that ideally you'd love for the consumer's experience to be something a little more comfortable than being imprinted with a glowing iron rod, right? Although, couldn't we all provide a list of companies who seem to be perfectly fine with that option?

In general, we're all becoming more and more aware that a Brand is not a logo, it's not an advertisement, it's not a mascot; it is the intangible collection of your customers' experiences. Every experience at every single touch point. It might even be worth arguing that the apostrophe should go before the s. Your Brand is not your customers' experiences, it's your customer's experiences. Might just be semantics, but in an age where consumers use Social Media to research products it's certainly worth considering that you have as many Brands as you have customers.

I used to work in graphic design and we'd get calls all the time about "rebranding" projects. Most of the time it was that the aesthetic truly needed an update, but sometimes the company wanted to distance itself from a negative reputation they'd developed. In those cases, what the client was asking for (rebranding) and what they needed (to rebrand) were two different things. As a designer, I was only able help them with the first (and less important) part.

Hopefully, you're not in that difficult situation that requires you to strategically remove a scarred imprint and replace it with something that reflects a character your organization can be proud of.

Hopefully, you're in a better place. A place where you have time to wonder, "Ok, we've got a good reputation. But do we have a great one? What more can we do for our customers and do we treat them like valued guests?"

To bring it back to Disney and to bookend the post with another image that says it all, I'll leave you with a picture that represents the Disney Brand more accurately than a logo ever could.